NEW YORK – Weekly World News announces Man and Woman of the Year: Dr. Dylan Evans and Dr. Rossana Kennedy.

NEW YORK – Weekly World News announces Man and Woman of the Year: Dr. Dylan Evans and Dr. Rossana Kennedy.

For their research on the sex lives of fruit bats; for their lawsuit involving sexual harassment claims regarding a research paper on fruit bats; for winning the Ig Nobel prize for their study on Fruit Bat Fellatio, Dr. Dylan Evans and Dr. Rossana Kennedy are WWN’s Man and Woman of the Year.

A lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, Dr. Evans won a sexual harassment allegations case made against him for showing his colleague, Dr. Kennedy, his paper on the sex lives of fruit bats.

WWN's MAN OF THE YEAR - DR. DYLAN EVANS

Though the case became a worldwide sensation in 2010, the original incident happened on November 2, 2009, when Dr Evans was passing by Dr Kennedy’s office and showed her his scientific paper entitled “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time”.

Dr. Kennedy was intrigued by the concept and discussed it in great detail, and at great length, with Dr. Evans. But another (perhaps jealous) colleague made a formal complaint.

The external investigation found that while Dr Evans had no intention to offend, the incident fell within the definition of sexual harassment under the university’s policy on ‘Duty of Respect and Right to Dignity’.

Following the two-day hearing, the judge awarded costs to Dr Evans who said he was “delighted with the outcome” and was “looking forward to putting this matter behind me and getting on with the job”.

After the case was adjourned the judge joined Dr. Evans and Dr. Kennedy in a pub for a public reading of Fruit Bat Fellatio (which is now being made into a musical with Bono and The Edge composing the music).

This year the research paper – which Dr. Kennedy added significantly to after the trial – was awarded a Ig Nobel Award for papers that may have humorous content as well as serious material.

Dr. Evans and Dr. Kennedy celebrated their Ig Nobel by spending a night in a Dublin hotel with two very special fruit bats.

----- WWN's WOMAN OF THE YEAR ----- DR. ROSSANA KENNEDY

It was a tough choice this year. The WWN Staff met for almost half-an-hour trying to decide this year’s honorees. There were a number of runners-up: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Chilean Miners, Anna Chapman (the Russian Spy) and Steve Slater (the JetBlue flight attendant that left the plane via chute) and Anna Pfeiffer (the cosmobiologist, juggler and locomotive engineer).

But – there has never been a more thorough and complete work on the sex lives of Fruit Bats. Since Fruit Bats are the crucial biological building block to ecosystems around the world and because fellatio has never been studied on such a grand scale – it was ultimately an easy decision.